Adrian Moore first came into contact with electroacoustic music in his hometown of Nottingham at a concert given by Denis Smalley. His undergraduate study was at City University (London, UK) where he began to compose in the studio as well as assist the Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain (EMAS) — which became Sonic Arts Network (SAN), now Sound and Music) with concerts. The performance of tape pieces using multiple loudspeakers interested him and his further study under Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham offered the opportunity of composing for and working with the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST). He graduated in 1998 but his seven years in Birmingham were interspersed with trips to CNSM (Lyon, France, 1991-92) and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1995).

His works have been performed and broadcast around the world and have received prizes and mentions in numerous competitions, including Musica Nova (Prague, Czech Republic, 1996, 2010), Noroit-Léonce Petitot (Arras, France, 1996), EAR’97 (Budapest, Hungary, 1997), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria, 1998), Bourges (Bourges, France, 1990, 2002) and Musica Viva (Lisbon, Portugal, 2004).

Having always held an interest in bringing the power of the tape medium into the live performance situation as well as to sound diffusion, Adrian Moore sees the technology of today as an ideal tool with which to work as a composer, teacher and performer. He is currently Reader in Music at University of Sheffield where he is the director of the University of Sheffield Sound Studios (USSS).

His motivations remain ‘acousmatic’ and current work includes multichannel (5.1) composition, laptop improvisation, and large spatialisation concerts using software developed at USSS.

Review

There is a new sophistication apparent in the brand new scoop of electroacoustics coming out of Britain — and from elsewhere too… That is plain to hear on a series of new releases from Canadian guru label empreintes DIGITALes, featuring three British sound wizards with already very famous names. This time we listen to Adrian Moore’s CD Traces.

The sophistication reveals itself in that it now clearly is composition and absolutely nothing else that kicks electronic ventures sky high! A few years ago I was worried that all the new, easily obtained machinery and software would dilute the traditionally highly intoxicating electroacoustic beverage, which it also did, momentarily, but these days my worries are gone, blown away by some of the best stuff I’ve heard in decades from the shamans of electroacoustics.

This means that the guys and dolls who mistook the machinery for the art now either have learned their lesson, or left the stage… The CDs I’ve received in recent months from labels in Sweden, France, Russia, Romania, Holland, Canada and other countries prove to be excellent productions. These artists master their software and hardware to such a degree that no machinery in the world can get in between them and the end result: the sounding work of art. These people are composers — again! — with compositional skills. The detour through the junkyards of binary tools is over. We’re back in business, and the composers are composers again. They are electroacoustic composers, using their machines and gadgets, but the driving force is imagination and visionary thinking — and intuition! — paired with an edgy compositional skill; and so the machines can be wonderful tools. This is what has happened as this sophistication has set in, and here we are with some highly tremendous stuff.

Adrian Moore is one of these sophisticated wizards, balancing his compositional act on an array of hard drives filled with shamanistic software… but he lets his imagination seep down like honey through the imaginary netherworlds of the binaries, and in the process he evolves and refines images and impulses originating in a French tradition projected by people like Jean Schwarz, Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle and others, not least the French-Canadian Maestro Françis Dhomont — and I’m talking about the earlier, analog groundbreaking actions of these guys (they’re still very active!), when they pushed the poetic and fairytale-like sound worlds of their inner visions to the forefront of electroacoustics.

I’m not precisely new to Adrian Moore. I think the first piece I heard of his was Breaking… Glass! (1991), which was broadcast on Swedish radio in 1993, when a program (FIX) specializing in electroacoustic music ran a series on works coming out of the studio of the University of Birmingham (associated with the organization BEAST; The Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre). His Sieve (1994-1995) — presented here — was also originally found on a CD from the 4th Prix International Noroit Leonce-Petitot 1995 de Composition Musicale Acousmatique.

Moore was introduced to electroacoustics at a concert with Denis Smalley in Nottingham. Later he studied with Jonty Harrison, and fate (?) has it that the three CDs with British composers that recently were released by empreintes DIGITALes feature these three sound painters.

The first piece on Moore’s CD is Junky (1996). The sounds are extremely delicate, measured down to the most miniscule fraction of a slice, slashing through space in your senses like samurai swords… After a short while this frantic impression gives way to an otherworldly feeling of austere detachment, complete alienation, as if you were experiencing a spill-over from another dimension — a dimension of the utmost excommunication, as might be experienced by space travelers cut off from Earth by some disaster or other at the shores of foreign worlds… or by a father seeing his children disappear in an ugly divorce, or rather the calm feelings of resigned despair that follows, when you just sort of watch the horrid circumstances like a work of art at a dazed afternoon exhibition or like a movie late one rainy spring… There is a mental “Entfremdung” in the music, like you were hearing it through the locked and barred windows of an insane asylum…

This music could also be a story told about events unimaginable by human Earthlings, tenderly told in this sound language, conveying feelings of something completely lost, like the introverted, calm despair of an alienated existence, extra-dimensional, far beyond the force of binary circuits, far beyond the illusion of Time, wrangling through the mineral world, which is a lonely place without points of reference — like the more frightful stages of the Bardo Thödol — or like a memory long lost in an overwhelming amnesia, in which just the gestures of meaning remain. It’s a very beautiful music…

Dreamarena (1996) is the second entry. This piece too is very imaginative, spatial, inducing all kinds of weird feelings of a kind of alienation, but this time as if you were transferred to a kind of insect perspective… You feel an intense communication going on here, but you can’t tell between what kind of creatures — or if indeed the morphemes that sweep past, back and forth in your listening space, between your temples, are a kind of human communication that you just don’t understand, as if you’ve suffered a stroke and woken up in utter aphasia… The music is frustratingly communicative, but unintelligible to you, though apparently not to the alien intelligences — if they are… — who really do exchange frantic messages right through your brain… You can only sense the bare gestures of communication… or is it a communication beyond language itself? Could it be the thoughts of angels, the thoughts of spirits, that you’re tapping into, breaking all the laws, inducing the wrath of God? You were not supposed to hear… in the same manner that you were not supposed to tap into the core of Existence by tampering with genetic codes… The Tower of Babylon again!

Or could these sounds be sonic representations of the insects’ communication by pheromones, across the vast summer meadows of an eternal June? For sure this communication has a magic quality, a surreal aspect, in the same way that the world would look very different if we suddenly could perceive other wavelengths of light than the limited spectra we usually can see.

Study in Ink (1997) is a completely delightful little obsession!Adrian Moore has reached down into his pocket and got his whiteboard marker pen out, indispensable to anybody having to make presentations to boards of trustees or any other congregation of the 21st century… He uses the sounds the marker makes on the whiteboard in such imaginative ways that you can’t but smile… This singular-origin-sound business sometimes can be really elating, as in the case of Jonty Harrison’s Hot Air (1995) — also on empreintes DIGITALes; IMED 9627; Harrison’s first release on the label — in which a great deal of the sounding result stems from children’s balloons, or like in the very classical case of Pierre Henry’s rusty barn door in Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (1963). Adrian Moore develops his sampling and manipulation of this darn marker pen’s frictional passages across the whiteboard to the extent that the sounds revealed push your associations in the direction of David Dunn’s magnificent hydrophonic recordings of the intricate sounds of underwater insects of North American and African freshwater ponds;Chaos & the Emergent Mind of the Pond (What Next WN 009). It’s amazing how much these completely different approaches — hydrophones in African ponds versus marker pens on British whiteboards — can resemble each other! The adventure is endless!

Foil-Counterfoil (1997) involves — of course — tin foil, closely recorded to reveal hidden sounds, but also utilizes the sounds of glasses, bottles, balloons etcetera. The effect is dizzying at times, in its innovative, controlled madness, where Moore has to use all his power of will not to go completely berserk in the sonic shop of his mind! You name it, we like it! Moore’s music involves so many qualities, but movement — the spatial aspect — is always very apparent, as is an uncanny feel for alien beauty and ominous auditive backdrops, in a therapeutical kind of fashion, as if you were present at the core of a schizophrenia session with Ronald D Laing or a spirit-on-reel-to-reel meeting with almost forgotten Friedrich Jürgenson.

The last piece is Sieve (1994-1995). This is the only piece on this set with a more obvious musique concrète leaning, since you can readily identify some sounds that — to begin with — are un-altered. The piece is very French, just picking up somewhere in the acousmatic tradition and taking it a bit further still. It is a wonderfully varied piece; a sort of variation on the moment, or variations on moments of reality, wrenched out of their natural passage-ways of causality, into the workshop of Adrian Moore, where the stolen moments are handled with binary pliers and deformed and re-shaped into lucid building-blocks for the composer’s almost metaphysical creation;Sieve .

Let’s congratulate Adrian Moore! This CD is a remarkable gift to the connoisseurs of contemporary sound-art, and constitutes a lasting contribution to art itself. Wonderful! Adventurous!

Wonderful! Adventurous!

Articles Written

Review

Adrian Moore, SAN Diffusion, June 23, 2004

The Compact Disc label empreintes DIGITALes currently numbers some 65 discs and embraces a diverse range of electroacoustic music. Yet there are many common motivating forces in this collection, the most notable being the ‘quest’ for sound. The variety of sounds on offer is well highlighted by these two discs, yet the techniques and methods used are remarkably similar and are rooted in this desire to search out the right compositional material.

Humeur de facteur (The Maker’s Humour) is some 54 minutes in length and consists of six movements, each one an individual making up part of the whole. Beaupré, a harpsichord manufacturer and composer (in both cases a builder) seems to bring the same sense of attention to detail to his music as he does to his harpsichord construction. The work itself resides in the world of the harpsichord; mainly pitched material treated and resynthesised to offer new timbral worlds. Inharmonic drone-textures shelter granulated plucked strings whilst small metallic percussion hint at the delicate interior of the harpsichord. There is a highly fluid method of mixing, a delicacy often left behind when working with so many disparate sources. It would be all too easy to wallow yet Beaupré manages to create a polyphony that offers a unique combination of weight and power, with enough breathing room to take it all in. The polyphony relies upon submersion in pitch and mode and Beaupré creates transitions between modes through spatial dissolves and other ‘ethereal’ scenes. At times, Beaupré forces his sounds upon us through mechanical repetition, but we are quickly lured back inside his world through bell-like sonorities and other more ominous textures.

Without being in any way melancholic, the work hints at the solitary life of the instrument maker, alone (but at one) with his work. Perfectly mastered - if you want to hear some of the bass attacks you’ll have to endure a fair degree of midrange pitch material – Humeur de facteur presents some wonderful sound-worlds. It seems apparent that after listening several times, the uniqueness of each movement is not as obvious as it might have first appeared. Moreover, the relationship between the movements becomes more beguiling as the work develops. It would not be naïve to assume however that no matter where in the 54 minutes the form became unfathomable, it is possible to ‘readjust’ ones hearing, enjoy the sonorities on offer, and quickly come back to the piece as a whole. In fact this work raises some of the most fundamental questions about so-called ‘old school’ electroacoustic music: Sound over form; a polyphony of disparate sources and pseudo-narrative structures (despite the abstract sound-world, the vast landscapes afford visualisation and to a certain extent, quantification). It is Beaupré’s mixing that offers us some answers. It is colourful and delicate yet purposeful and at times profound. In a dark corner, this is perhaps where the Humeur de facteur can be found.

Fractures on the other hand finds itself rooted in a world of noise, chimeras born of real world sounds and synthetic noises. Whilst Beaupré placed emphasis on the vertical through mixing, Bouchard directs his attention to the horizontal, focusing our listening towards the passing of time: The montage here is timed to perfection.

Angle mort is a Kingdom hospital of sound, dealing with ‘the struggle between antibodies and viruses and the auditory point of view of the patient surrounded by machines in a hospital room’. Sounds are clear and well balanced; given their individual complexity, too much mixing would be inappropriate. At times, metallic drones provide a skin for the scars of glitch. But this is not really ‘glitch’. These small sounds, driven by dark rhythms possess a certain resolve. They are the right sounds at the right place at the right time. Whilst these small glitches could be heard as the sounds of mechanical error outside of the work, their contextualisation is definite; not only from sound to sound but within the sound itself. Each sound seems clinically prepared and the mastering is excellent. Bouchard draws you in to his dark and strangely impersonal world through a fairly frenetic opening section. We are suddenly made self-aware – and perhaps we are patient – as the sound world turns in on itself. As the piece draws on it becomes increasingly difficult to follow the pace of the music. The timbral invention of the first ten minutes loses some of its vitality, leaving one feeling slightly empty at the close of the work.

Bouchard then presents us with his sketches in the form of Trois miniatures en suite. These short vignettes shed light upon the remainder of the disc and give us an insight into Bouchard’s working method.

Without conjuring an inevitable Deleuze & Guattari moment, it seems safe to say that in Parcelles, a work focusing upon sounds that seem to organize themselves from what appears to be chaos and ‘create a music I am often the only one to hear’, Bouchard is talking about the elusive rhizome. Both Parcelles 1 and Parcelles 2 (some 20 minutes in total, split into 7 and 5 movements respectively) draw naturally upon Trois miniatures… but also incorporate the darkness of Angle mort. Dark however becomes bleak and impersonal becomes inevitable. The inevitability of sound pervades Bouchard’s music, as indeed does his compassion towards the recorded ‘scenes’ (something that transpired only after numerous auditions). At once a contradiction appears. We are borrowing Bouchard’s memories – it is wonderful but at the same time it is not enough. In Bouchard’s words these are ‘incredible moments’ he wanted to share but they are but ‘fragments of moments’. (I actually prefer the French, partager which doesn’t sound as personal.) We are continually invited to grasp at the moment but it is continually torn away.

These may sound like negatives but over a good pair of loudspeakers, one can almost touch these invitations of sound, such is the clarity of recording and mastering involved. So in a sense, one is offered a chance of being part of ‘the moment’, not too much so as to become overly attached and not too little so as not to recognise it.

Naturally one must go beyond the traditions and forms of the past: these are short movements of between one and four minutes. Must they have a form? Can they not just be structured? What is fascinating about these two pieces is the continuity between cuts and the bizarre concoction of real life (albeit filtered and edited) and a lurking synthetic residue. Try to focus upon the ‘moment’ and physically edit the cuts out of the work and this music becomes frustrating. Let it wash over you and you will be disappointed. In short, Parcelles (and to some extent Angle mort) require extended, attentive listening, preferably over a good pair of loudspeakers that can project the beautifully crafted full range sounds, glitches and hard edits. I particularly liked the energy of the penultimate movement in Parcelles 2, Brazil Wins. We are presented with some truly original work on this compact disc.

… truly original work…

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